I recently switched from the world of Microsoft to Mac, and so far the transition has been flawless. On my old PC, I used EAC with the LAME encoder constantly in order to rip all my audio CDs to my computer. I'm kind of obsessed about mp3 quality, so EAC was perfect for me. But now I have a Mac - and obviously the program doesn't work on OS X. Virtual PC is an option, but a painfully slow option, so now I need to know: what is my best and most viable alternative to EAC on a Mac?

Before EAC I used Real Player & Windows Media Player to rip all my CDs, and needless to say the quality was less than adequate. Since then I've been afraid to rip CDs on any type of music library program - iTunes included. Is iTunes my only feasible option? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jason

You can use the next best thing to EAC, CD Paranoia. It may not work flawlessly on drives that cache audio data, according to this thread. CD Paranoia is bundled in the multifunction xACT program.

Since you're so "obsessed" with quality, why don't you rip to a lossless format, like FLAC or Apple Lossless?

I'm obsessed with MP3 quality. I would rip with a lossless format, but most of these songs appear on my iPod at one point or another, and I don't have the time to convert the lossless files to MP3 just for the sake of having them on my iPod. I'll give CD Paranoia a try - thanks for the quick reply.

cdparanoia is generally the best (much better than iTunes), but to be safe you should also have the alternative cdrdao. It comes with FireStarter FX and with Missing Media Burner.

Welcome to Mac!

FireStarter FX is only any use if you want to make a copy, not for any post-rip compression etc. If you want to do anything other than burn a copy using MissingMediaBurner the ripper is cdda2wav and it does not use paranoia unless you show/alter the command before running.

CD Paranoia is definitely great for extraction although my experience is that it can get hung up on some CD's for no apparent reason (there is no physical damage and other programs seem to have no problem ripping the CD). This doesn't happen very often though--seems like 1 out of 100.

As a bit of a sidebar a good opportunity for you may be on Online Music Blog (www.onlinemusicblog.com). They are giving away five $250 gift certificates to my company Awaken (www.awaken.com). Awaken converts CD collections into digital music libraries in most popular formats (MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg, FLAC, AIFF, ALE). This includes shipping, CD repair, and DVD backup of your music libary. $250 will almost completely cover the costs of converting 300 CD's.

The blog doesn't get really high traffic so your chance of winning is pretty good. Only requires a name and email address. I think he's awarding the gift certificates on the 24th of June.

Cheers,

Chris

Those using cdrecord, cdda2wav, cdrdao, it helps to check to make sure you have a recent version of the cdrtools from Freshmeat or Schilly's site because earlier versions error out on certain types of CD's. The latest stable (2.01) seems OK so far but bugs are fixed often. The neat thing about cdda2wav is that as mentioned above you can choose to read the CD using libparanoia or libscg, if paranoia isn't working (should never happen).

Uhm, Apple recently switched from PPC to x86.

A friend of mine used to say: "You've a MAC: you'll die by loneliness !"